221 - Planetarity Now! (with Jonathan Blake and Nils Gilman)
Cultures of Energy
Dominic and Cymene are beaming to you this week from a European Cup-addled Berlin. They share a few reflections on their time in Cape Town and then ruminate on why it is it doesn’t seem possible to hate anyone from California. Is it the sunshine? As if to underscore this point about the essential good of Californians, we welcome to the podcast (15:55) two brilliant residents of the Golden State, Berggruen Institute based political philosophers Jonathan Blake and Nils Gilman to talk about their new book, Children of a Modest Star: Planetary Thinking for an Age of Crises (Stanford UP, 2024)....
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220 - Design Earth (with Rania Ghosn)
Cultures of Energy
Cymene and Dominic recap last week’s Petrocultures Los Angeles conference and discuss the new filed in France seeking to press criminal charges against the CEO and directors of the French oil major TotalEnergies. Then (15:27) we welcome the brilliant and megatalented Rania Ghosn to the podcast. We start with the work of , Rania’s practice together with El Hadi Jazairy and how the collaboration began. Rania explains how Design Earth seeks to explore how design can help respond to the climate crisis and why they tend to work in a narrative or speculative mode. We discuss their strategies...
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219 - Climate Storytelling (with CNN's Bill Weir)
Cultures of Energy
Dominic and Cymene react to the police violence sweeping across US university campuses. Then (15:11) we are thrilled to welcome CNN’s Chief Climate Correspondent, Bill Weir, to the podcast. We begin with the big news of the day—the landmark legal ruling by the European court of human rights that Switzerland had violated the human rights of more than 2,000 older Swiss women by failing to cut its national greenhouse gas emissions. Then, we dive into Bill’s great new book, (Chronicle Books 2024). We talk about how to balance nightmares and dreams in climate storytelling, techniques for...
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218 - Solar Futures (with Siddharth Sareen)
Cultures of Energy
Cymene tries to convince Dominic to join the Freemasons on this episode of the Cultures of Energy podcast. Plus, a shallow dive into Buzkashi, the national sport of Tajikistan, the country that helped convince the UN to designate 2025 the International Year of Glaciers’ Preservation. Then (13:22) we are thrilled to welcome Siddharth Sareen from U Stavanger, author of (Bristol U Press, 2024) and the winner of this year’s in Norway (go Sid!) We start with how Sid’s interests in energy research shifted from India to Portugal, an underappreciated star in solarity. We talk about the...
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217 - A Song of Concrete and Ice (with Cristián Simonetti)
Cultures of Energy
Cymene accounts for her mysterious conversion from a coffee-drinker to a tea-drinker but [spoiler alert] it turns out she’s not a doppelganger after all. Then after some EV road trip talk (16:06) we are delighted to have Cristián Simonetti join us from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. We start with Cris’s research on concrete, one of the most abundant contemporary materials, and what it reveals about the course of the Anthropocene trajectory. From there we talk about the debate over the Anthropocene designation and how stratigraphers tend to petrify earth processes by...
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216 - Carbon Colonialism (with Laurie Parsons)
Cultures of Energy
Cymene arrives at the Covid party on this week’s episode and she’s got the sultry radio voice to prove it. We share a few words about a magnificent pug named Doug and Cymene discovers Russell Brand’s rightward "grift drift" to her horror. Then (18:58) we welcome Laurie Parsons to the podcast to talk about his excellent new book, Carbon Colonialism (Manchester U Press, 2023), which originated from his long-term research on the Cambodian garment industry. Laurie explains how when it comes to climate change we’re really not all in it together: carbon colonialism creates northern...
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215 - No More Fossils (with Cara Daggett)
Cultures of Energy
The Cultures of Energy podcast is back with the first of several new episodes for 2024. First, Cymene and Dominic share what they've learned from their very late arrival to watching the show Survivor and why Shadow, their 75% chihuahua, has never worked a day in her life and proudly so. Then (11:40) the main part of this week's episode is a conversation between Dominic and Cara Daggett () about his latest book No More Fossils (online Open Access edition here: . Many thanks to Maggie Sattler from U Minnesota Press for organizing the conversation and for a wonderful job of producing and editing...
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214 - Oil Beach (with Christina Dunbar-Hester)
Cultures of Energy
Dominic and Cymene start off with a review of the new Apple TV Cli-Fi series Extrapolations especially its killer walruses and then recap a chat with German climate activist Luisa Neubauer and former US National Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy about how civilizational change is coming, either by design or by disaster. Then [23:51] we are thrilled to have USC’s Christina Dunbar-Hester join us on the podcast to talk about her new book Oil Beach (U Chicago Press, 2023), a study of toxic infrastructure and more-than-human relations in the Los Angeles port complex. We begin with how her interests...
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213 - The City Electric (with Michael Degani)
Cultures of Energy
Cymene and Dominic natter a bit about holiday misadventures and then (13:49) happily welcome Mike Degani (Cambridge U) to the podcast to talk about his new book, The City Electric (Duke UP 2022). We begin with how Mike became interested in electricity as an ethnographic object through experiencing power failures in Dar es Salaam. Then we talk about how electropolitics threads through various key moments in Tanzanian history. We turn to Tanzanian postsocialism, the durability of socialist habitus and how Mike’s concept of modal reasoning connects to the moral quandaries of neoliberal...
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212 – Carbon Technocracy (with Victor Seow)
Cultures of Energy
Cymene and Dominic relate tales from their harrowing weekend of having to deal with the absence of Henry Rollins in Black Flag and the presence of an active shooter down the block. Then (15:35) we welcome Harvard’s own Victor Seow to the podcast to discuss his remarkable book, Carbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia (U Chicago Press, 2022). We start with how studying labor migration in Manchuria first led him to the largest open coal mine in Asia, Fushun—now a pit with three times the excavated material of the Panama Canal—whose story became the crux of the book. We...
info_outlineCymene and Dominic tease a family revelation and describe a museum full of caricatures of East Germany (a regime that tbh itself kinda caricatured socialism). Then (17:03) we welcome back to the podcast the one and only Laura Watts (https://sand14.com), now at Edinburgh, who has a marvelous new book out with MIT Press, Energy at the End of the World: An Orkney Islands Saga. We start there and talk about how the remains of a Neolithic city first brought her Orkney and inspired her with its archaeology of the future. Inverting traditional conceptions of center and periphery, future and past, seemingly remote Orkney has now become the center of a marine energy future. We chat about her use of the Saga form as a structuring principle in the book, why she finds hope in the relational character of the “Orkney electron,” and the European Marine Energy Center (EMEC) as a global beacon of renewable energy science and industry. We talk about the troubles of harvesting energy from dangerous water, the ambivalence of life in a “living lab” and the intertwined futures of Orcadian humans, marine wildlife and marine energy. We close on writing, and how the choice of words can make some worlds more or less possible. Finally, folks, just a reminder to drop whatever you are doing and go out and strike for climate action this Friday, September 20. To find the nearest march to you check out, https://globalclimatestrike.netSee you on the streets!